Did I mention I graduated? Yeah, done with undergrad. Free and all that. Now I need a steady gig to pay the bills. I'll probably chime in later about my personal growth and journey, but right now I actually want to talk about stuff that's of interest to the five people who might read this.
First, I have started a new project. I'm doing requirements analysis right now and I expect to hit the first alpha release by the end of August (that's in 10 days). It's to be a metadata-driven web content management and presentation platform. Unlike the plethora of CMSes out there, it is not designed to be blog- or portal-styled. It's express purpose right now is to power an e-zine, meaning I hope to have heavy stylesheets functionality built in. I call it metacite (Get it? "Site," "cite" - website, citation? Yeah, you'd have to be a language nerd...)
One of the more radical objectives, and this has until December for realization, is to provide all the functionality necessary for content layout and minimalist editing, including image effects/operations. Doing that via a web interface is extremely icky, and I'm looking at various ways to solve the roundtrip problem. Right now the leading contender is to write the editor(s) in SWF, but SVG remains an option. Chrome is also an option, but that'd tie me to Mozilla. We'll see.
In other news, I am signed up for the PyWeek Game Programming Competition, running from Sunday, August 28 to Sunday, September 4, 2005. This will be my first serious and non-instructional attempt at writing a game in over five years, and it's to be based on a set of themes that are extremely... "out there." Fortunately, I've been broadening my design sensibilities plus hanging out at GamesAreArt.com (which is where I heard about the compo originally), so I should be able to come up with something halfway decent.
Besides, I have a BA in Cinema and Cultural Studies! [smile] I figure it's about time I actually used this journal to chronicle some development, so here goes.
Right now I'm thinking I'll constrain my PyWeek entry to 2D. This has a number of reasons, including the fact that Python access to multimedia services remains somewhat iffy (yeah, yeah, dxpython, Panda3D, PyOpenGL - I know about all of them, and they all have their own challenges); content creation is expensive, particularly on such a short timeframe; I am on a severely underpowered machine right now; and that working within constraints leads one to strip away superficiality to arrive at the central aesthetic and semantic representation/experience. I want to see what I can do in stylized, physics- and simulation-driven 2D, as well as see if I can shoehorn some generative techniques in there.
Wish me luck (and, yes, I'll keep you posted).
